Suddenly can't read man pages (SOLVED)

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Clint Harshaw wrote:
> >
> > > Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> > > > What would cause some users (me and root, in particular, but not others)
> > > > to be suddenly unable to read any man page that isn't already in
> > > > /var/cache/man/?  Any other man page displays a blank screen with the
> > > > (END) prompt from less.  Happens in GNOME and on the console.
> > > >
> > > > TIA.
> > >
> > > Matthew:
> > > Does the same behavior show up when you are using xterm?
> > > Clint
> >
> > Yes, it does.  Also, root's problem is a red herring.  The problem occurs
> > for root if I "su", but not if I "su -" or log in as root on a console.
> > So the problem is definitely just me, and it must be something I set but I
> > can't think what.  I'll be trying replacing .bashrc and .bash_profile
> > later today to see if I can identify the setting that causes the problem.
>
> Matthew,
>
> There are several ways that man figures out what directories to look at
> for pages.  Try doing a "man man" and then "/SEARCH" and "n" and you'll
> find the section on search order.

That would have been rather tough on the machine in question, as man was
one of the pages I couldn't read...

>
> As a quicky, I'd ensure that you have an /etc/man.conf file and that you
> haven't set the MANPATH variable in your ~/.bash* scripts.  The "env"
> command will show you what your environment variables are.
>
> HTH,

I hadn't touched either of these, so /etc/man.config was the default from
the RPM and no MANPATH was set. But I had copied over my old .bash_profile
script which is from a version of RHL old enough that it set BASH_ENV to
${HOME}/.bashrc.

I rebuilt .bash_profile a few lines at a time, and it turned out that
adding that variable caused the failure.  I guess I haven't read a man
page on this machine since installing FC2.  This behavior seems to be new
with FC2, but I don't really know why BASH_ENV was necessary before nor
why it is necessary not to have it now.

On a related note, I notice that an old bug where LD_LIBRARY_PATH set in
.bash_profile would get overwritten during GNOME startup is also fixed in
FC2.

Thanks Clint and Ben!

-- 
		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs